Stephen Coonts - Combat

A boot came down on his forearm.

Whatever else he had lost, he had not lost his language skills. He understood the words, “American scum.”

“Bob?” he called again. It was hard to keep focus. “Sergeant Crawley?”

He had to spit the blood from his mouth. Gagging.

Outside the cabin, a man laughed again. A woman’s wail colored the distance.

Rough hands yanked Green to his feet. To his astonishment, he found he could stand. But the darkness would not hold still and he nearly toppled. The sound in his ears rolled and rolled. Instinctively, he raised a hand to wipe the slime from his mouth and chin, but a gunbarrel forced the hand back down.

Someone threw something at him, shouting. He had been unprepared. The object — heavy fabric — hit his chest and fell.

The skull. He remembered the skull.

The voice commanded him to pick up the object and put it on. It was his jacket.

That was when he realized they were not going to kill him right away.

Someone thumped him between the shoulder blades and told him to get outside. Green stumbled toward the different darkness. Dizzy. Nauseated. The air was damp and cold, with the smell of a rifle range. His ears still pushed sounds away, making them small and hard to hear. But he could see clearly.

Where was Crawley?

Dark figures in masks. A fire in a house beyond the inn.

Green bent and hacked up the blood he had swallowed. Then he wiped his face with his hand. No one stopped him this time.

The Jeep rested on flattened tires, shot up. The vehicle’s armor was light, intended to stop assassins with pistols and sloppy shooters during a drive-by, and really all it meant was that you could not roll the windows down. Now the Cherokee looked like a butchered animal.

Green was afraid. And ready to puke from his lack of equilibrium. But training counted for something, however useless. He noted the assortment of weapons the men carried. Belgian FNs, Kalashnikov variants, one jagged little HK. He counted seven raiders, then an eighth man came out of the shadows. There was still screaming and clatter up in the street, so there would be more of them. Their uniforms were as confused as their armaments, ranging from full cammo to jeans and leather jackets. The only thing they had in common was the black commando mask each man had pulled down over his head and neck.

Two of the men tied Green’s hands behind his back with rubbercoated wire. They were good at their work. Then a tall, thin man with a young voice barked at him in dialect. When Green didn’t respond, the man shoved the butt of his rifle into his gut, driving him back against the Jeep.

The rain had blown over and a few tough stars shone between the clouds. But most of the light came from flashlights, a couple of them big and rectangular like the kind a conscientious driver might keep in the trunk of a car back home.

“Get the other one. Let’s get going.” Green understood that.

There was a brief, low-voiced argument. Then the thin man and another gunman in a ragged Bundeswehr parka slung their weapons behind their backs and went into the cabin.

They lugged Crawley’s body outside, belly down, and dropped him on the gravel. His back was shredded, the blood dark as wine under the beams of light. His neck was broken and he had bled from the mouth. The sergeant’s pants were stained. As if he had been hung.

A stocky man bent over the corpse. Crawley’s hair was cut very short and the man lifted the head by an ear. A big hunting knife extended from his right fist. He took a practiced stance and swung the knife down like an executioner’s axe. He knew his business, but it still took four hacks to separate Crawley’s head from his body.

The butcher laughed and held up the head, giving some sort of cheer Green did not understand. If he could have killed all of them, slaughtered them, Green would have done it. But he just stood against the wrecked Jeep, hands bound, helpless.

The man bent down again and cleaned his knife on Crawley’s shoulder, then sheathed it. He took the head in both hands, stretching out his arms, and shook out as much of the blood as he could. Bits of pulp splattered the earth. When the gore tapered to a few drips, another of the men held out a plastic shopping bag and the butcher dropped the head in it.

Routine business.

Green closed his eyes, but it did not help.

A muzzle prodded his bicep.

“Hajdemo!” Let’s go.

He did not understand the rules. His captors carried their weapons at the slack, unworried about a counterattack from the villagers. And there had not been much of a fight, really. There was so much Green could not explain. He wondered if Melnica had survived because it had cut some kind of deal not to resist.

They forced him to walk through the spread of Crawley’s blood.

In the street in front of the inn, Green saw the woman, Daniela. On her knees. Begging.

The four men encircling her laughed.

“Hajdemo!”

Two of the raiders lifted Daniela to her feet. One of them kicked her.

Green did not even think to protest. He had trouble walking straight. And his hearing still had an underwater feel.

The column turned up the street that led to the mountain. In a little barn, a cow gave an annoyed moo. The houses remained shuttered and blacked out.

Daniela was four places ahead of him in the line. She was not bound, but she did not try to flee. Instead, she pleaded with the men to let her go back to her mother. She sounded like she was ten years old. Except for the occasional joke, the gunmen ignored her.

It was cold. Green had not had the presence of mind to zip the jacket before they bound his hands. And even the thought that he might die soon did not make the cold any less a bother. His feet stung and itched and hurt.

Much of life was adaptation to your environment. Even the shorter, stockier gunmen were accustomed to climbing. Green kept himself in good shape, but his legs soon strained at the steepness and pace. When he slowed even a little, a muzzle jabbed him in the back.

He had seen them cut off Crawley’s head. It had been indescribably real, immeasurably repugnant. Yet now, on the mountainside, the death was already hard to believe. He remembered the NCO saying something about the attack being aimed at them. And Green remembered the man covering him with his body. The things men did. The marvel of courage. He doubted his own bravery, that he would have done such a thing. He had-thought of himself as a real hotshot, a first-rate officer. Now he hardly felt like a soldier at all. He felt as though he had been faking it his entire career.

He saw himself as a failure and an ass, and he was afraid. Fighting the tears in his eyes. Glad of the darkness.

They pushed through a grove of evergreens. The wet branches slapped him and soaked through his jeans. But the pine smell was gorgeously alive.

He saw the pulp of Crawley’s hacked neck. He saw the head, with the sleepy look of the open eyes.

That was how it looked.

Green fantasized about escaping, trying to imagine how it might be done. But his hands were tied, and the trail was steep, and he did not know the way. They would catch him. In moments. And perhaps kill him for annoying them.

The girl sobbed and kept climbing.

He did not know exactly where the border lay. Somewhere over the crest. But he realized that was where they were going. He was a prisoner of the people from the other side.

Despite the muzzle prodding him, he had to turn from the path and gag up more of the blood he had swallowed. His nosebleed had stopped, though not the dizziness.

Yes. The people from the other side. The butchers. The men who made the mass graves. It was as if they had sensed where his sympathies were headed. And came for him to make him pay.